About 20 forest defenders slept in tents, the backs of cars, and a truck parked sideways across a road in southwest Vancouver Island, trying to stop a logging company from cutting old-growth trees the next morning. They woke at 3 a.m., took their positions with headlamps tracing the ground, and an hour later a logging truck slowed, idled and turned around without anyone getting out or speaking. Quiet resistance. No permits, no speeches from the top, just bodies in the road where the machinery wanted to roll.
Who Pays for the Harvest
Bill Jones, a First Nations Pacheedaht elder, put the damage in plain language: “There is no dispute about what happened to our land.” Jones, who is 86, said he had watched the forests on his nation's territory disappear for most of his adult life. He said he started logging at age 18 before he understood what he was helping to dismantle. “There’s nothing left — it’s practically naked, bare,” he said. “There’s few remnants here and there, and so we have to save what we can.”
That’s the human cost the industry ledger leaves out. The people living with the aftermath are the ones left to watch the stumps spread while the profits move elsewhere.
The fight is over some of the rarest and most carbon-rich ecosystems on Earth. Coastal temperate rainforests cover barely half a percent of Earth's land surface. Vancouver Island's remaining stands, some home to thousand-year-old trees, store more carbon per hectare than nearly any other forest system, according to the Sierra Club of British Columbia. Since industrial logging began more than a century ago, most of Vancouver Island's productive old-growth forests have been cut. About 20% of those forests remain, according to the Sierra Club, and most of what remains is still open to logging.
Old-growth western red cedar, defined by the province as trees 250 years or older, produces wood so durable and rot-resistant that it fetches significantly higher prices than other local species. It's widely used in construction and, despite recent tariffs, the United States remains a major export market. Second-growth forests are younger stands that regenerated after previous logging and produce less-durable wood products. Although the province says more than 11 million hectares of old growth remain, scientists say there is only about 415,000 hectares of productive old growth capable of growing the largest trees.
What the State Calls Management
The province says it has deferred or protected 2.4 millions of hectares of old growth since 2021, but critics say most of those measures are temporary and some deferred areas continue to be logged. At the same time, British Columbia Premier David Eby's government has pledged to increase timber harvests in an effort to revitalize the forestry sector. Opponents argue those goals are incompatible.
British Columbia's forests minister, Ravi Parmar, said that if a long-term agreement with the Pacheedaht Nation is not reached before the Fairy Creek deferral expires he would seek another extension. That’s the reform trap in a sentence: another extension, another deadline, another promise that the machinery of extraction can be managed into something gentler while the saws stay ready.
Parmar said the transition away from old-growth logging cannot happen overnight. He pointed to the province's old-growth deferrals and protections, alongside investments in second-growth hemlock milling, as evidence that British Columbia is moving away from dependence on old-growth timber. He said the industry is also under pressure from U.S. tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber, which now top 45%. Parmar said, “Forestry is the foundation of our economy. It provides good paying, family supporting jobs — about 100,000 direct and indirect,” and added, “If we were to shut down harvesting of all old forests here in British Columbia, it would shut down our sector completely on day one.”
Those are the words of the apparatus defending itself. The sector first, the forest second. The jobs argument hangs over the blockade like a threat dressed up as necessity.
Direct Action Meets the Logging Road
The fight is not unique to British Columbia. During the Timber Wars of the late 1980s and 1990s, activists occupied giant redwoods, chained themselves to logging equipment and blockaded roads across California, Oregon and Washington. More than 850 people were arrested during the 1993 “War in the Woods” protests at Clayoquot Sound. Nearly 30 years later, more than 1,100 were arrested at Fairy Creek, where blockades won temporary protections now set to expire in September.
Back at the blockade, word spread of a new area where logging was being planned, this time on Ditidaht First Nation territory to the north. They began making calls, hoping to connect with local land defenders. That’s the part the institutions can’t script away: people organizing horizontally, passing the word, trying to link up before the next road gets cut and the next stand gets reduced to a memory.
In the Walbran Valley, also on Pacheedaht territory, logging by Tsawak-qin Forestry, a company co-owned by the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and forestry giant Western Forest Products, has exposed tensions over whether forests on traditional territories should be managed for economic development, conservation or both, and who within Indigenous communities can decide. The ownership structure says plenty. Even here, the bosses wear different names, but the same pressure runs through the land.
Andy MacKinnon, a forest ecologist in British Columbia, said, “Once an old-growth forest is logged, it will require millennia before it has the structure, composition and function of the forest that was logged — if in fact it can ever recover in times of changing climate.” He said some coastal old-growth stands on Vancouver Island have not experienced a major disturbance since the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago. Their layered canopies, nurse logs and ancient root systems create habitat for hundreds of species, including threatened marbled murrelet seabirds and salmon.
The forests also drive tourism, which some researchers argue outweighs their value as lumber. Visitors from around the world flock to the island's ancient groves to experience towering, moss-draped cedars and Douglas firs. Veronika Sitar, an outdoor enthusiast from Campbell River, said she drives and hikes hours into the backcountry most weekends to document old-growth stands before the loggers reach them. On a recent trip into the north island's Prince of Wales range, she reached General Buxton, one of the largest yellow cedars in British Columbia, and found flagging tape just 200 feet, or 60 meters, away marking the route of a proposed logging road. She said, “I don’t want to get too attached knowing what will be logged.”
Jones said he was troubled not just by the loss of the forests, but by people's connection to them and, in turn, to themselves. He said, “We’re just fighting over the leftovers.”